I'm of the opinion that the soul is just the results of brain activity and thus can't exist in a lower liform or before a life exist. As for whether it survives after death... Well there is serious scientific studies into out of body experiences and reincarnation (and some existing results in the latter's case). This would of course seem to contradict my previous point though I'm not convinced about out of body experiences and think reincarnation could be a sign of as yet undiscovered genetic memory in humans.

In my opinion, the use of the term "God" cheapens the concept of a soul....kinda takes it down a notch by extension.

Might be we are energy beings placed into a physical form for experience....who knows.

No need to make something up just because we don't understand it.

IMO, thinking of us as separate entities outside of our mortal existence makes us lesser. Instead of "souls" before and/or after dead, I look at the cycle of rain;

Water vaporizes out of the great ocean, precipitates and falls back as individual rain drops before finally rejoining great ocean. Does the raindrop cease to exist when it hits the ocean? No. Does that same raindrop reappear later? Never.

I think the same goes with what we think of as "souls". We're temporary raindrops simply enjoying a brief moment alone before rejoining all the other raindrops in the great ocean.

What I mean, is that your soul is your personality. As in "Old King Cole was a merry old soul".

Partially. I think, more directly, a soul is the essence of what makes a person that particular person. Personality is only part of it. Psychologically, a child's personality isn't set until they are at least a couple of years old....if then.

Partially. I think, more directly, a soul is the essence of what makes a person that particular person. Personality is only part of it. Psychologically, a child's personality isn't set until they are at least a couple of years old....if then.

From the Bible, we learn that God cast out 1/3 of heaven's angels. Those that chose to follow lucifer were expelled from heaven.

But why?

I suspect that evil is a thing, a disease. A self-willed disease of sorts. It is also highly contagious and very corrosive to the being it infects (think WWZ).

As such, God quarantined evil to earth. He could not allow it to infect heaven and or the universe so he isolated it to one planet.

Then one must then wonder, why would God have souls (implanted in human bodies) reside on this planet infected with evil? That seems cruel, no?

Imagine however, that souls where in heaven at the time of lucifer's fall. souls that were developing in a kind of divine incubator. It may very well be that the souls were exposed to this evil while in this developmental stage. Angels, however, were fully developed able to rightly choose or not choose evil. Souls, on the other hand, were not yet fully developed; as such their "choice" was not a fair choice.

God had mandated that those infected with evil must be cast out and quarantined, however, what of these souls that were developing. they were exposed...but is it fair to cast them out? They were immature, not capable of real choice.

God devised a plan. He froze the souls in heaven and to let them develop on the quarantined planet where they would be able to rightfully choose evil or not. They will be placed into human bodies and as such into divinely created scenarios where the "choice" will truly be theirs.

Until a thing is shown to even exist any talk of "When" is not even worthy of speculation. It is fine for any individual to believe whatever they wish, but claiming it as reality for anyone else is unacceptable.

1) The Bible, while containing a lot of ancient wisdom, also contains a lot of perceptions from relatively unsophisticated people 2000-4000 years ago.

2) If God is both all-knowing and all-powerful, then God knowingly created "evil" and there can be no doubt about the victor in a battle between good and evil.

3) I expect the vast majority of the story about Lucifer and fallen angels is apocryphal. although there is the possibility that it's a distortion of actual historical events such as fallen civilizations or the arrival of humans on the planet. This latter is intriguing, and there are tens of thousands of year gaps in our history, but has zero evidence backing it.